Iten, a town of 4,000 people in western Kenya, is known across the world of athletics as the semi-mythical “home of champions”. For more than three decades the village, 8,000ft above sea level, has produced Olympic medallists and marathon winners with uncanny regularity, nearly all of whom are descended from the Kalenjin tribes that have lived for millennia at high altitudes in the great Rift Valley.
The London-based photographer Shamil Tanna, whose father was born in a village near Iten, has been documenting the latest generation of runners for a personal book project. His photographs capture the almost monastic ritual of the young athletes’ days, which begin and end in the half-light to avoid the full heat of the sun: run, recover, run, recover. Invariably the aspiring champions work in groups, challenging the records and times of their heroes, pushing one another on.
Many European and American runners have visited Iten, hoping to discover the secret of the town’s success. What they find is an intensity of training and dedication that is unrivalled elsewhere. The runners, most of whom have grown up in the impoverished hut villages nearby, carry all the hopes of their families with them as they put in hard miles on dirt tracks. Tanna’s pictures – the one here of DayGlo feet pounding the terrain is typical – bear witness to that collective concentration and joy and suffering. Each runner has individual goals, but they live and train together – sharing meals of ugali, a maize porridge that they believe puts extra miles in their legs each day. “They run for their tribe, their community, their country,” Tanna says. “But most of all they run for the possibilities of the future. Every step of the way, they are pushed closer to that future by the community of runners who run alongside them.”
